Still Time
by infinite.regress17
Summary: A picnic under Belshazzar's Eternal Rainbow gives the Doctor time to reflect on a difficult day and contemplate his relationship with Clara. Missing scene: takes place immediately after the Zygon Inversion and is canon compliant. I would really appreciate comments/feedback on content and style. Thanks!


This scene takes place immediately after the Zygon Inversion.

'For a while there you must have thought I was dead. What was that like?' Clara asked as she flicked at a button on the TARDIS console then shot a sideways glance in his direction. She knew what had happened. He'd parachuted from a plane, seconds before it was blasted out of the sky, with the security of the planet hanging in the balance and the words "Clara Oswald is dead" ringing in his ears.

'Longest month of my life,' he said flatly. He looked down at the floor of the TARDIS so to avoid looking at her.

'Must have been all of five minutes,' she laughed, a bit stiffly, almost nervily. She pushed a stray hair back into place and carried on flicking that button. He was stone: his eyes flinty and his whole body a solid mass of tension. He formed his words deliberately.

'I'll be the judge of time,' he said as he walked slowly over to the far side of the console. His footsteps on the metal floor, that might have echoed, were soon lost against the background hum of the console room.

He had presided over a whopper in the Black Archive today. The Osgood boxes: truth or consequence for 20 million hidden Zygons. In one box a device to strip away their camouflage for ever and in the other a deadly gas: revelation or devastation. Although hitting "erase" 24 times until he got the result he wanted was almost cheating, but wasn't that what he did? Change the rules so he didn't have to lose? And It nearly always worked. But today he had to face square on some things he'd tried very hard to forget. The truth: even a clever reboot, spinning Gallifrey off into a pocket universe, was not enough to entirely silence the screams. Once he _had_ pressed a button, just like the one on the Osgood boxes, and sometimes he still felt the weight of a billion souls on his back. He wouldn't forget today in a hurry. He looked across the console at Clara, still nervy and fiddling, and he did a sort of mental calculation. Lost souls of Gallifrey against the wrench in his chest when he thought she was dead. He couldn't check that balance sheet. He didn't want to. She'd had a hell of a day today too and he realised she still looked distracted and unsettled.

'You know what we need?' he said, deliberately trying to lighten the mood by pushing his shoulders back and jiggling his arms. He forced a lighter tone into his growling brogue. 'We need somewhere to shake this off.'

'Sounds good,' she smiled, looked at him with her trusting eyes. She was ready to follow him anywhere. He ought to show her more than a new monster each week.

'As a matter of fact I do have somewhere in mind,' he said. 'Give me twenty minutes.' He landed the TARDIS at a bustling open air market. The sights, sounds, and sometimes frankly off-putting smells, of a small solar system, tucked away in the Large Magellanic Cloud greeted him. Hydraxi Prime had it all. The market place was chock full of life from every part of the galaxy: Slitheen chasing deals; a pair of Menopter buzzing along with their black and yellow bodies shining and delicate lacy wings folded carefully away; an Osirian trader standing regally over a table of high tech and ancient relics. As he walked the weight of the day started to lift and he remembered: this is why I travel! He wished he had brought Clara to see this, but he wanted to surprise her. He found a stall with a spread of exotic food and wine and took a deep breath; the smell of stardust and spice filled the air. He scanned the stall in front of him. He dusted off a bottle of wine squirreled away behind a row of multi-coloured spirit bottles. Perfect. But food? An Ood greeted him with it's pure white orb in its leathery hand.

'How may I serve you?' it said in a sing-song voice with facial tentacles quivering.

'I want this.' He lifted the wine bottle, 'And some other things for a picnic.' The Ood's tentacles trembled enthusiastically.

When he returned to the TARDIS and Clara, twenty minutes later - good to his word - it was with a picnic basket, a blanket, and a smile.

'Found just what I was looking for!' he said cheerfully. He turned the bottle around in the basket to show Clara the label. It was black with swirly gold lettering that said, "Tantalus Cluster Vineyards 2412" Clara raised an eyebrow. He tilted his head toward her with a slightly worried expression. 'You do drink red wine don't you?'

'Sure. Have we really never shared a bottle of wine before?' She traced a finger over the embossed label; the paper was rough but the gold was rounded and smooth. The picture showed a tormented figure reaching for an exotic-looking fruit just out of his reach.

'I suppose not,' he said. 'Then this will be a first. The Ood I got this from told me this wine is complimented perfectly by these.' He pointed to the other things in the basket, figs, a plastic wrap of odd looking clams, and chocolates. Clara's eyebrows went up again.

'He saw you coming! Did he try to sell you mood lighting too? 'cos quite frankly, the accent's enough,' she teased.

'What do you mean?' he said staring at her blankly.

'Never mind!' said with a wry chuckle, 'Where are we going then?'

'A peaceful spot. Belshazzar's Rainbow.'

When Clara and the Doctor stepped from the TARDIS it was onto a rolling blue hillside. The spring of the grass made walking light and breezy and above a rainbow filled a full third of the sky. Clara breathed in deeply, let her head tip back as she spread her arms in an exhilarated whirl and spun herself underneath the palette of colours, as if this was exactly what she needed after being trapped for hours in a Zygon pod.

'Wow. That is serious sky decoration. Will it last long enough for us to have our picnic?' she called. The Doctor smiled and swung the basket over the crook of his arm.

'It's the Eternal Rainbow.'

'Eternal? Now I just bet there's a story behind that,' she said, smiling and bringing her spin to a gentle stop in front of him.

'Yes, a rather sad one as it happens. It's a memorial.' He had found an area of soft flat blue and put the basket down. 'Belshazzar Renn was a legendary planet-scaper,' he said. 'The story is he lost… someone who mattered to him and went a bit mad. He spent four and a half years on his own here obsessed by figuring out how to make the perfect memorial.' He unfolded the picnic blanket and gave it a shake. It billowed up into the air and hung suspended for a moment before falling gently to the blue carpet. He felt compelled by sadness of the story. Perhaps Belshazzar Renn was a man stuck too long in his own head pretending the battle was against a technological problem because that was easier than dealing with his grief. Maybe.

'Sounds tragically romantic. Like the Taj Mahal.' Clara said as they sat down. The Doctor pulled the bottle of wine from the basket and began to spike and twist at the cork.

'The really interesting thing is _how_ he did it. It was an engineering puzzle. He worked out in the end that he had to grind an azbantium lens to use as a spectral divider – impressive since azbantium is 400 times harder than diamond - then he submerged the lens in a pool of geothermally heated chromatically fractured water. When sun's rays hit the device, which is all hidden away over that hill incidentally,' he paused his twisting with the corkscrew for a moment and pointed up the sweep of the hill to where the rainbow began, 'Then the rainbow achieves a steady state.' With a final flourish he pulled the cork from the bottle and then began unwinding it from the metal twist of the corkscrew.

' _That's_ the interesting thing?' she said rolling her eyes but smiling. She got some of the figs from the basket and passed one to the Doctor before biting into hers. It made an odd crackle against her tongue. After a while she said, 'Four and a half years stuck on his own grieving and puzzling all that out? Sounds like torture. Did he ever get over it?'

'He found a way to move on I think. He certainly went on to scape other things. There's a Belshazzar's Garden for example.' He put the cork carefully in his pocket and poured two glasses of wine then handed one to Clara. She swirled the wine around the glass thoughtfully then took a sip. It was heady with a hint of cloves, alien, with a familiar edge. 'It was a vintage year, 2412,' he told her nodding at the glass. She raised her glass and let it hover near his.

'What shall we drink to then?'

'Peaceful moments?'

'Peaceful moments. The bits in-between the monsters,' she clinked her glass to his.

After a while he dug into the basket and saw the clams shut up in their little cellophane package, and wondered for a moment about breaking them open. He couldn't quite bring himself to do it, so he left them, untouched, at the bottom of the basket and got the chocolates out instead and put them on the blanket by the wine. They sat in silence and soaked in the calm; the colours overhead and the blue grass below. The sun and the wine warmed them and after a while the memory of a day of explosions and frustration and fear seemed as far away as the rainbow. He stretched the full length of the blanket and she settled her head on his chest and made a companionable 'T.' They both looked up at the sky.

'You know in Norse legend there was a rainbow bridge from Earth to Valhalla,' Clara said. She picked up two chocolates and passed one to him, then unwrapped hers. She let the dark chocolate slowly melt on her tongue. It was different from Earth chocolate; the bitterness was balanced by a sweet almost rose-like flavour.

'Bifrost,' the Doctor said, 'The bridge between Midgard and Asgard.' Clara crinkled and scrunched the wrapper between her fingers and then tossed it into the picnic basket. He watched her intently.

'I wonder if we could step through that rainbow to somewhere else?' she said, gently biting her lip. He wondered for a moment what she was thinking, then he looked up at the sky again and said gently:

'It's an engineered system, Clara, not a magic portal,'

'A girl can dream,' she said wistfully and weaved her fingers through the cool blue grass. After a moment he took the cork from his pocket and turned it over in his hand. She watched him fiddle for a while and then held out her own hand. He put the cork neatly in her palm.

'We should do this more often. Go nice places. Eat together. Drink wine,' she said, turning the cork in her hands, then cupping it and bringing both cork and her hands to rest on her chest.

'Yes we should,' he agreed. He knew it now, he had taken a while to get there, but now he saw things much more clearly. He had been born clueless. "I'm not your boyfriend Clara," he'd said, desperate for her to see him but already pushing her away, and that set the tone for a season. She'd almost left him. She teetered on the brink between him and Danny Pink. That last hurrah on the Orient Express. That dress! He didn't dare look at her most of the time: he may be Doctor Idiot but he was not blind no matter what she might think.

He was an idiot who'd let a hug hide a ridiculous lie about finding his home. Yet somehow they'd got a second chance, and they'd grabbed that second chance and were twirling it into an adventure. She'd taught him to be a better version of himself; hugged him into submission. He watched her hands and her chest rise and fall and her mouth curve into a smile. He knew that face. He understood her better now than he ever had. She was braver, bolder, taking more chances. They had been lucky today, but she was delicate, breakable. It felt like there was a storm coming.

'Clara,' he rolled her name to the sky and sweeping his hand the full length of the rainbow said, 'there's so much I haven't shown you yet.' The words scratched his throat as he spoke.

'There's still time you daft old man. I'm not going anywhere,' she said cheerfully. He was buffeted by her breeze, uneasy, unsettled, yet completely unable to stir himself. There was a storm coming, and instead of getting the livestock in and nailing up the shutters he was sitting on the porch with his face to the wind watching the clouds roll in.

'Where would you like to go? What would you like to do?' he said finally. He could take her anywhere to do anything; they had all of time and space in a magic blue box.

'How about we find somewhere nice and have a proper meal together? Drink another bottle of that Tantalus wine? Maybe go check out Belshazzar's Garden?' Her eyes glowed and she rolled the cork backwards and forwards between her fingers.

'Ah! The second most beautiful garden in the universe. So they say.'

'Well that's settled then,' she nodded.

'Yes boss.' The breeze had blown a wisp of hair across her face and he moved it aside. She smiled up at him: an impossible smile that made his hearts ache and sing. Clara was a mayfly, and Ashildr was right when she said one day she'd blow away like smoke. But not today. Today the mayfly had her head on his chest and her face to the sky, and there was still time to eat, and drink wine, and walk in the second most beautiful garden in the universe: there was still time.


End file.
